How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals


Book Description

Do you supervise people? If so, this book is for you. One of a manager’s toughest—and most important—responsibilities is to evaluate an employee’s performance, providing honest feedback and clarifying what they’ve done well and where they need to improve. In How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals, Dick Grote provides a concise, hands-on guide to succeeding at every step of the performance appraisal process—no matter what performance management system your organization uses. Through step-by-step instructions, examples, do-and-don’t bullet lists, sample dialogues, and suggested scripts, he shows you how to handle every appraisal activity from setting goals and defining job responsibilities to evaluating performance quality and discussing the performance evaluation face-to-face. Based on decades of experience guiding managers through their biggest challenges, Grote helps answer the questions he hears most often: • How do I set goals effectively? How many goals should someone set? • How do I evaluate a person’s behaviors? Which counts more, behaviors or results? • How do I determine the right performance appraisal rating? How do I explain my rating to a skeptical employee? • How do I tell someone she’s not meeting my expectations? How do I deliver bad news? Grote also explains how to tackle other thorny performance management tasks, including determining compensation and terminating poor performers. In accessible and useful language, How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals will help you handle performance appraisals confidently and successfully, no matter the size or culture of your organization. It’s the one book you need to excel at this daunting yet critical task.




The One Thing You Need to Know


Book Description

Drawing on a wide body of research, including extensive in-depth interviews, THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO KNOW reveals the central insights that lie at the core of: Great Managing, Great Leadership and Great Careers. Buckingham uses a wealth of relevant examples to reveal that at the heart of each insight lies a controlling insight. Lose sight of this 'one thing' and all of your best efforts at managing, leading, or individual achievement will be diminished. For great managing, the controlling insight has less to do with fairness, or team building, or clear expectations (although all are important). Rather, the one thing great managers know is the need to discover and then capitalize on what is unique about each person. For leadership, the controlling insight is the opposite - discover and capitalize on what is universal to all your people, regardless of differences in personality, race, sex, or age. For sustained individual success, the controlling insight is the need to discover what you don't like doing, and know how and when to stop doing it. In every way a groundbreaking work, THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO KNOW offers crucial performance and career lessons for business people at every level.




Get Rid of the Performance Review!


Book Description

The performance review. It is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. We all hate it. And yet nobody does anything about it. Until now... Straight-talking Sam Culbert, management guru and UCLA professor, minces no words as he puts managers on notice that -- with the performance review as their weapon of choice -- they have built a corporate culture based on intimidation and fear. Teaming up with Wall Street Journal Senior Editor Lawrence Rout, he shows us why performance reviews are bogus and how they undermine both creativity and productivity. And he puts a good deal of the blame squarely on human resources professionals, who perpetuate the very practice that they should be trying to eliminate. But Culbert does more than merely tear down. He also offers a substitute -- the performance preview -- that will actually accomplish the tasks that performance reviews were supposed to, but never will: holding people accountable for their actions and their results, and giving managers and their employees the kind of feedback they need for improving their skills and to give the company more of what it needs. With passion, humor, and a rare insight into what motivates all of us to do our best, Culbert offers all of us a chance to be better managers, better employees and, indeed, better people. Culbert has long said his goal is to make the world of work fit for human consumption. "Get Rid of the Performance Review!" shows us how to do just that.




HBR Guide to Performance Management (HBR Guide Series)


Book Description

Efficiently and effectively assess employees performance. Are your employees meeting their goals? Is their work improving over time? Understanding where your employees are succeeding—and falling short—is a pivotal part of ensuring you have the right talent to meet organizational objectives. In order to work with your people and effectively monitor their progress, you need a system in place. The HBR Guide to Performance Management provides a new multi-step, cyclical process to help you keep track of your employees' work, identify where they need to improve, and ensure they're growing with the organization. You'll learn to: Set clear employee goals that align with company objectives Monitor progress and check in regularly Close performance gaps Understand when to use performance analytics Create opportunities for growth, tailored to the individual Overcome and avoid burnout on your team Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.




Performance Review


Book Description

Performance Review, the first monograph by North Carolina-based artist, educator and activist Endia Beal, brings together work from first-hand experiences that highlight the realities and challenges for women of color in the corporate workplace. Beal's widely-published videos and photographic series, including "Am I What You're Looking For?" "Office Scene," "Can I Touch It?" and "9 to 5" are presented in a book sequence that highlights the ambitions, challenges and negotiations that women of color navigate within the workplace.Beal's signature directness and visual intelligence engages viewers of varying generations and backgrounds in dialogues that accept there is much to questions we push forward during the social evolutions of our time.The book includes an introduction by Beal's contemporary and colleague Whitney Richardson, former producer and writer for The New York Times "Lens" photography column among other roles, and now Global Events Manager for The New York Times in London.




The Performance


Book Description

A novel about three women at turning points in their lives, and the one night that changes everything. One night, three women go to the theater to see a play. Wildfires are burning in the hills outside, but inside the theater it is time for the performance to take over. Margot is a successful, flinty professor on the cusp of retirement, distracted by her fraught relationship with her adult son and her ailing husband. After a traumatic past, Ivy is is now a philanthropist with a seemingly perfect life. Summer is a young drama student, an usher at the theater, and frantically worried for her girlfriend whose parents live in the fire zone. While the performance unfolds on stage, so does the compelling trajectory that will bring these three women together, changing them all. Deliciously intimate and yet emotionally wide-ranging, The Performance is a novel that both explores the inner lives of women as it underscores the power of art and memory to transform us.




How To Say It Performance Reviews


Book Description

Written by two top business trainers, this guide reveals the strategies and language skills needed to make the most of performance appraisals - for both the reviewers and the reviewed. It breaks the process into five simple steps and explains what to say with hundreds of winning phrases organized by topic (and hundreds of counterproductive phrases too). Also included is advice on preparing an agenda, body language, and tone of voice - plus true success and horror stories.




The Essential Performance Review Handbook


Book Description

Are performance reviews at your company like fruitcake—you get it every year whether you want one or not? It doesn’t have to be like that. Because everyone wants to know how they’re doing, how they measure up, and what their chances are for advancement and rewards. And they want to do things right. The Essential Performance Review Handbook will help you understand why performance reviews: Serve as an important business tool. Motivate personnel and increase productivity. Help achieve your company goals. Improve manager-employee communication. Reduce your risk of legal liability. Whether you're a manager or a HR professional, this is an indispensable resource to help you create confident, motivated, and productive employees.




Next Generation Performance Management


Book Description

There is no HR-related topic more popular in the business press than performance management (PM). There has been an explosion in writing on this topic in the past 5 years, condemning it as a failure and calling for fundamental change. The vast majority of organizations use the same basic process which I call “Last Generation Performance Management” or PM 1.0 for short. Despite widespread agreement that PM 1.0 is failing, few companies have abandoned it or made fundamental changes to it. While everyone agrees it is broken, few agree on how to fix it. Companies continue to tinker with their systems, making incremental changes every few years with no lasting improvement in effectiveness. Employees continue to achieve amazing things in organizations every day, despite this process not because of it. Nothing has worked because organizations, business leaders and HR professionals focus on PM practices instead of the fundamental purpose of PM and the paradigms, assumptions, and beliefs that underlie the practices. Companies ask their performance management process to do too many things and it fails at all of them as a result. At the foundation of PM 1.0 practices is the ideology of a meritocracy and paradigms rooted in standard economic and psychological theories. While these theories were adequate explanations for motivation and behavior in the 19th and 20th centuries, they fail to account for the increasingly complex nature of organizations and their environments today. Despite the ineffectiveness of PM 1.0, there are powerful forces holding it in place. Information on rigorous, evidence-based recommendations is crowded out by benchmarking information, case studies of high-profile companies, and other propaganda coming from HR think tanks and consultants. Business leaders and HR professionals learn about common practices not effective practices. This book confronts the traditional dogma, paradigms, and practices of PM 1.0 and holds them up to the bright light of scientific scrutiny. It encourages HR professionals and business leaders to abandon PM 1.0 and it offers up a more appropriate purpose for PM, alternative paradigms to guide them and practical solutions that are better supported by scientific research, referred to as “Next Generation Performance Management” or PM 2.0 for short.




Writing Performance Reviews


Book Description

This user-friendly book is filled with guidelines to help you write performance objectives, reviews, appraisals, and other performance documentation. The book's tips and tools help you find language that's clear, descriptive, objective, and acceptable in today's workplace. Examples, questions, and activities will help you learn on your own, with your team, or with others in your organization.